Bloodshed, Bedlam, Squalor and Worse
Authoritarianism is popular.
In yesterday’s post, “Unreality in the Streets of DC,” Steven Taylor expressed his concern about the authoritarian nature of President Trump’s announcement that he was federalizing the DC police and that, in doing so, he was “propagating myths about urban areas and how crime-infested they are.” In the first comment on the post, @Joe observed that, “I encounter plenty of people from my own city, let alone smaller towns, who live in absolute fear of big cities because of what they have read but never experienced.”
I think that’s right. That was certainly my impression of places like New York, Chicago, and DC from afar. Having been to the first two of those cities many times and worked in the last for years, it’s wildly overblown.
Here’s what Trump, who spent most of his life living in New York City, said yesterday:
Something’s out of control, but we’re going to put it in control very quickly like we did on the southern border. I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.
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And you people are victims of it too. You know, you’re reporters. And I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side, but you don’t want to get — you don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened. And so, you can be any — anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets. You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now.
The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth, much higher. This is much higher. The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years and the number of carjackings has more than tripled. Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever. They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years. Can’t be worse. Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore.
It’s almost comically exaggerated, much like the much-lampooned “They’re eating our dogs” spiel from the presidential debates. And, yet, I have no doubt that a huge swatch of the country is cheering the crackdown.
While our cities are by no means crime-infested hellholes, most have a major problem with homelessness. At the very least, there’s something unsettling of having to walk around homeless people sleeping on the sidewalks at all hours of the day or being unable to use the public parks because they’ve been taken over as homeless encampments. Even Democratic mayors have started cracking down—with the permission of the US Supreme Court.
I took to RealClearPolitics to see how those on the right are reacting. Sure enough, it’s playing well.
The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York (“Why Trump is right on DC crime“):
The main argument of Trump’s critics is that violent crime in Washington is going down, so there is no reason for Trump to take over the MPD or call in the National Guard or direct federal law enforcement to the city’s streets. It is true that violent crime statistics are going down, although there have been questions about the accuracy of the police department’s crime reporting. But the undeniable fact is that crime is going down from some very high levels during the pandemic. Plus, just because the incidence of a particular crime is down from last year does not mean it is low today.
In any event, crime remains a serious, quality-of-life-changing issue in the district. In 2023, a bad year for crime in the district, there were 40 murders per 100,000 residents. In 2024, that number fell to 27 per 100,000. So is that good? It is certainly a positive thing to have fewer murders, but 27 per 100,000 is still quite a lot. In fact, according to figures compiled by the Rochester Institute of Technology Center for Public Safety Initiatives, the homicide rate of 27 per 100,000 is the fourth-highest among U.S. cities.
In raw numbers from the MPD, the city had 274 murders in 2023, followed by 187 murders in 2024. Now, in 2025, if current trends continue, it appears the district might be headed for around 170 murders. So you can look at it two ways: One, it’s good that murders might go down from 187 last year to 170 this year, or two, 170 murders is still a lot.
Beyond homicide and other violent crime, there’s no doubt that a sense of just-below-the-surface danger and disorder keeps many district residents in a state of unease. One of the reasons Trump decided to act was the attack on a former official in the Department of Government Efficiency effort, Edward Coristine, who was badly beaten in an attempted carjacking in the city. After the Coristine attack, Trump pledged to federalize law enforcement in the district.
Of course, the Coristine beating was not unusual. Events like it caused the city to impose a curfew on young people this summer. That is evidence enough that a city has a crime problem. But a recent Washington Post story added this: “Hours after Coristine was attacked, residents in a nearby block were rattled awake by shouting on their usually quiet, tree-lined street. One person described peeking out their window and seeing a rowdy crowd of youngsters, some in masks. Later, they saw a young man, beaten and bloodied.”
Police came and could not find any suspects or the young beating victim, either. That was another crime that will not go into the statistics. Then more from the Post: “The weekend’s incident unnerved residents. … ‘This is a safe city, but overhearing and witnessing gang threats and then watching the camera footage of the thuggery is disturbing,’ said one resident, speaking on the condition of anonymity over concerns of personal safety. The crowd of teens, he said, was roaming the street and appeared to be checking for unlocked cars and things to steal.”
On the one hand, the resident said the city is safe. On the other hand, he did not feel safe enough to speak on the record. What kind of safety is that?
UnHerd’s Emily Jashinsky (“How crime shattered DC: The US capital needed an intervention“):
Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the centre of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”
This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.
Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week.
The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.
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Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”
In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offences outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offences district-wide.”
Just days later, the Navy Yard neighbourhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighbourhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorisation — for lack of a better word — of our neighbourhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”
Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.”
This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the run-up to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.”
In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.
Even the establishment WSJ Editorial Board (“Donald Trump, D.C. Police Commissioner: Cleaning up the city is a worthy task, and local control is dysfunctional.“) joins in:
Mr. Trump’s opponents are in the awkward position of arguing it’s no emergency if last year a mere 187 people were murdered and only 1,026 were assaulted with a dangerous weapon.
By getting involved in D.C. governance, Mr. Trump is setting a precedent, and the next Democratic President could follow it, with other priorities. Yet Republicans might still consider that an improvement on the status quo. At least the White House is sensitive to national opinion, which is larger than the progressive voter base that elects the D.C. City Council.
Recall that President Biden signed a Congressional resolution in 2023, amid that year’s murder surge, to overturn the D.C. City Council’s revisions to its criminal code, which included a reduction in the maximum penalties for carjacking and illegal gun possession. The vote in Congress included dozens of Democratic ayes. One was Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig, who had been assaulted in an elevator at her D.C. apartment building. Another was Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, who later that year was carjacked at gunpoint.
On the whole, local control of D.C. looks like a failure. The city has enshrined noncitizen voting in local elections and “sanctuary” policies to thwart federal immigration enforcement. Why should the President and Congress stand for this in America’s seat of government?
Mr. Trump loves to cast himself as a man of action, and now he’s top cop. If he really helps to clean up D.C., clearing out homeless camps and making public spaces safer for residents and tourists, he’ll deserve thanks.
I’d note that all three acknowledge that the crime rate is indeed down from the high Trump cited. Jashinsky went further, noting that much of the city is actually thriving and a nice place to live and work. Yet they all welcome the crackdown.
The Atlantic‘s Quinta Jurecic, who is decidedly not on the right, paints the early actions of the deployed feds in a comical light.
So far, however, the surge in law enforcement—which began a few days ago, before this morning’s announcement—appears mostly farcical. Footage from WUS9, a local news station, showed a pack of Drug Enforcement Administration agents lumbering awkwardly along the Mall in bulletproof vests as joggers streaked past. (For those unfamiliar with D.C., the Mall—a green expanse frequented by tourists and ice-cream trucks—is not exactly a hotbed of crime, especially on a sunny summer morning.) Near my quiet neighborhood in D.C.’s Northwest quadrant, federal officers have been patrolling a tiny park whose chief menace, in my experience, has been the occasional abandoned chicken bone scarfed down by my dog. Over the weekend, I watched a Secret Service car drive slowly in circles around my block. At first I assumed that the agents had gotten lost.
But even illusory crackdowns on crime are popular. Those of us of a certain age remember President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which famously funded “his goal of putting 100,000 police on America’s streets.” A quarter century later, Kamala Harris criticized Joe Biden for his role in its passage in the Democratic debates. But it was wildly popular at the time and the Clinton Foundation was still crowing about it on the 20th anniversary.
Edward Coristine… now where have I heard that name?
Here’s a thought. If most of the crime is at night, put most of the DC police and other augmented forces on the night shift. Reduce the day shift. Watch the union squawk. No one needs to be patrolling the joggers and baby carriage pushers.
I was in Caracas in the eighties and there were military, with automatic weapons, on almost every corner. Some intersections had elevated observation towers.
It was shocking to me then.
It seems like the MAGA vision for America now.
Lost in the haze….Trump could literally snap his fingers and federalize DC policing, yet on January 6th, with scores of police officers being assaulted and Representatives and Senators at risk, he did nothing. Big Balls gets mugged, another false premise “emergency”* is declared and the presidential fingers are snapped. Can’t the media see a pattern?
*Yes, people want safe cities, people want the drug trade destroyed, and people want criminals from other countries to stay away, but they also want the constitutional republic established 250 years ago to continue….with separation of powers and due process, and without a mentally unstable conman using phony emergencies to justify a blatant power grab.
Tangential to the DC story is this:
Trial exposes internal tension over Trump’s use of National Guard in LA
Who was the senior CBP official?
Who is Gregory Bovino? Here is one view.
He misled the public about his last big immigration sweep. Now he’s leading the Border Patrol in LA
In other words, he lied.
@Charley in Cleveland: All of this does rather underscore his complicty in J6, now doesn’t it?
@Daryl: I lived in Bogota in the mid-1990s and had a simialr experience.
There was the time I was stopped by two heavily armed military guys and frisked because I was wearing a bulky jacket. Freaked my wife out, who didn’t realize I had been stopped and kept walking, only to look back to see me with my hand on the wall being patted down.
BTW: This will all be popular with a lot of his supporters. Militarizing cities will also not be popular with a lot of people.
But I will admit it is always disgusting to watch ostensibly smart people who get paid to write for a living, falling for this stuff.
This isn’t how you fix crime or homelessness. If criminals are so powerful that it takes the deployment of massive federal assets to keep them at bay, then it means the deployments have to be permanent. The security theater currently taking place is not sustainable.
@Daryl: I had a similar experience in Santiago, Chile in the ’80s. Cops were indistinguishable from army soldiers, each with an automatic weapon across his chest. That’s how we knew it was a dictatorship.
@Charley in Cleveland:..they also want the constitutional republic established 250 years ago to continue….with separation of powers and due process, and without a mentally unstable conman using phony emergencies to justify a blatant power grab.
I would suggest that the Republicans in the United States Congress, the Senators and Representatives who could stop the madman Trump do not want any of this.
“I have no doubt that a huge swatch of the country is cheering the crackdown.”
True, as most of Trump’s supporters think that the use of the police in this manner will only happen to those people, and will never be used against them.
@Pylonius:
Sounds like something you take after you hurt a knee sliding into 2nd base.
I trust Trump will soon be federalizing Guard troops for and sending the FBI to Memphis, Detroit, Little Rock, Cleveland, Birmingham, Kansas City MO, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Flint, Lansing, Beaumont, New Orleans, Battle Creek, Springfield OH, Kalamazoo, North Little Rock, South Bend, Elkhart IN, Springfield MO, Rockford IL, Toledo, Evansville IN, Wichita, Nashville, Dayton OH, Jackson TN, Houston, Chatanooga, Pontiac, Harrisburg, and Anchorage. All cities with a higher violent crime rate than DC, but in states that went for Trump. (2023 data.)
@Gregory Lawrence Brown: That’s certainly the way it seems. Trump’s enablers are a bigger part of the problem than he is.
@Daryl:
In August 1987, I had just PCSd from Balboa in San Diego to Subic Bay when a coup attempt was made against Corazon Aquino. We were restricted to base so I have no personal experience with what went on in the country.
OTOH, Dear wife was in Manila for her immigrant visa in Dec 1987, when a very serious coup attempt happened. DW got through it ok, but I have never asked her for details like what was going on in the streets.
@Charley in Cleveland:
Bingo.
Everything Trump has to say about anything is complete bullshit. Uncritical minds gobble this up.
I regularly travel to NYC, LA, Chicago and other cities “on the list.” Acquaintances and relatives reflexively warn wife and myself of the dangers of our visits. And yet these are people who rarely leave their own insular communities, and typically lean Trump+Fox. They have been rendered paranoid and terrified. (Can Trump-Fox messaging qualify as terrorism?)
During our visits to these cities we walk, alot. Miles. And at night. We find the streets filled with friendly people enjoying the community as we do, without threat.
The ’80s were a fraught time, including in Western Europe–plenty of heavily armed West German military around, but mostly in areas of potential terrorism (train stations, airports, near embassies, and malls). Threats included anti-nuke groups like the Red Army Faction, along with others.
This militarization of US cities is disturbing, and has been repeatedly pointed out, this doesn’t stop crime or end homelessness. It could well make it worse.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m more disgusted. In 2016 and ’17 a number of conservative pundits turned anti-Trump, more for marketing reasons than sincere conviction. It’s not that the guys you’re talking about aren’t really smart, it’s that they’re smart careerists. They, or their managing editors, have bought into the idea the zeitgeist has turned conservative. I greatly fear they may be right.
@Steven L. Taylor:
They were looking for any “dangerous ideas” you might have in possession.
I made multiple trips to Mexico City decades ago, and was surprised by the sheer number of rifle toting soldiers every other block or so, projecting “force” on the streets. Something I hadn’t seen since living through a military coup overseas as a young adult. That “projection of force” is the point — to both reassure and terrorize the public. But it is what we expect in unstable, weakly or non- democratic societies .
The stark contrast to my own country’s street corners with low law enforcement presence and zero military, was not lost on me even those many years ago. I hate that we’ve come to this, and through manipulation, a ploy, rather than any real threat.
Even if somehow this country can move past Trump, the scars will remain on our national psyche.
As with so many pictures of ICE raids, it’s striking that in that picture from the Mall, no two DEA agents (“agents”?) are wearing the same thing. Even their vests are different colours. How is anyone supposed to know who is.. well, anything?
The criminal is Trump and his commie dictatorship that llegally deports asylum seekers to torture prisons without due process. Any serious crime crackdown would start with the felon in the Oval Office, a thug and rapist who incited a terror attack on Congress, then pardoned and released the terrorists.
Everybody knows Republicans love crime. They elected a criminal-in-chief who thinks desperate stunts like these will hide their job-killing incompetence. If they wanted to reduce crime they’d help Democrats invest in affordable housing and healthcare. Instead, Republicans increase poverty with Trump’s job-killing tariff inflation, gut healthcare to give corrupt billionaires another tax cut. Crime reached 50-60-year lows under Biden, childish crybaby Trump will mess that up too.
@gVOR10: I suspect many people in those states will cheer it just the same. Even the elected officials from those states will support it-the cities aren’t voting for them anyway. People who support this sort of thing who live near one of those cities will also want to “get tough” on crime there. Maybe even more so since local dangerous criminals are much more a scary threat than dangerous criminals in one of those coastal hell holes*
* You can’t fool me that they aren’t, I saw Escape from NY as a kid
@Pylonius:
On the one hand, it’s a hell of a coincidence.
On the other hand, I can absolutely see him making lewd sexual comments at a 15 year old girl, and getting the shit kicked out of him by her and her boyfriend. Or any number of other scenarios that result in him getting beaten up by children.
It’s worth noting that only a few months ago interim DC US Attorney Ed Martin was issuing official statements about how Trump’s polices were leading to a significant decrease in crime in the District.
Of course, once that Administration decides that down is up, we have to memory hole these sorts of counterfactuals:
Where are the photos and videos of the Feds patrolling the streets of Southeast DC? Those are the ones I want to see. Patrolling the mall is a waste of resources. Is there any footage of them working in SE?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Indeed.
The “popularity” of an idea is a bit of a minefield, especially in a democracy. First, there is the issue in the OP and the cited articles that confuses the popularity of a result (the overall reduction of crime) with the popularity of the means to that result (Trump’s fascist federalization of domestic law enforcement). “Less crime is preferred” does not lead directly to “more authoritarianism is preferred” any more than would “World peace is preferred” lead to “A one world government under the benevolent leadership of Putin is preferred.”)
Then as Dr. Taylor describes, demagoguery influences popularity, but it can’t really drive results. Through effective propaganda and gaslighting, a leader could easily make a desired outcome popular when they can lie about the existing conditions or game the evidence of the results. Take for example Trump’s descriptions of the Biden economy or the firing of the head of BLS for reporting valid data on Trump economic conditions.
@Matt Bernius:
The data shared by journalists yesterday indicating violent crime in D.C. at a 30 year low came from the DOJ in a press release earlier this year.
I kept wanting some questioner to jump in and ask AG Bondi whether she feared for her job over (now obviously) rigged DOJ DC crime data considering how BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer just lost her position due to rigged jobs numbers.
Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.”
Trump’s spent his life building ugly crap and he doesn’t want see to homeless people on the streets either. My brother develops hotels and restaurants for PE. Says that every time he’s been in a Trump place, a dozen of these red flags go off all at once. Ugliness and cheapness are the path.
We saw this in the pandemic. Resilience and tolerance turned into privileged values. The rest of the country gets the fantasy of apocalyptic landscapes and traumatic memories of watching four days of George Floyd protests shaking their very souls. Every experience is as earned as a degree from Prager U. It’s why the cost of living in so high in cities. People are moving to get as far away from the American core as possible.
@Scott F.:
I had not realized that they handed out DoJ data yesterday. And yes, that’s a great point. Frankly there is no way for them to back up their narrative without pushing the data, and their own data Departments, under the bus. Did the lie about under-reporting in that meeting?
BTW, I wrote a longer comment on the topic in the specific thread Steven wrote yesterday. I recommended folks read Jeff Asher’s analysis of what the data show. As you point out, it doesn’t back up the latest narrative. https://jasher.substack.com/p/assessing-dcs-violent-crime-trends
The problem is that far too much of our population is marinating in a media environment–either directly or via friends and family–that is far more interested in reporting anecdote and fear than what the data show.
Anyone else remember way back in 2015, when pre-MAGA conservatives flipped their … excrement … over a military training exercise in Texas, Operation Jade Helm?
They were convinced that this was a Russian misinformation operation, and that this was part of a bigger plan by President Obama to round up political dissidents.
Gov. Abbott even sent the Texas State Guard to monitor the operation.